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Why so few Python jobs? (and licenses)

Mark mmealman at tarsis.org
Wed Oct 10 10:31:49 EDT 2001 
In article <7xn13060xv.fsf at ruckus.brouhaha.com>, Paul Rubin wrote:
> Cliff Wells <logiplexsoftware at earthlink.net> writes:
>
> leisure, sure, that's a gesture of goodwill.  If I spend $5000 worth
> of development time writing and releasing a feature for GIMP that I
> could have had instead by paying $500 for a retail copy of Photoshop,
> the GIMP author has (at least monetarily) benefitted from my effort
> more than I've benefitted from his.  (Note: that GIMP example is made
> up, not something that really happened to me).

The GIMP author isn't benefiting, so much as the community is.

Even if the author took all that code, bundled it up and went commercial,
the GPL ensures that your contribution and the origional work it contributed
to remain in the public.

Short term, going commercial may win the author some money, but longer term
it's a dead end. The public version will likely exceed the commercial port
in features and stability.


I understand how it might be distasteful that the origional author might
take your work and earn profit off of it.

But if the alternative is that once you GPL software you lose all copyrights
over it once anyone submits a patch, then there's every reason not to
release your software under the GPL.

I haven't read the GPL in awhile, but it seemed that the intent was that a
software author DID keep his copyright on any software he GPL'd.

It was win/win.

Win for the author: he keeps his copyright, no one can take his software
away from him if it's GPL.

Win for the community: they gain his software, and not even the author can
take it away from them.

Right now I think the community is operating on a system of respect. Core
authors are respecting patch submitters and not going commercial.

But as more and more corps start using GPL resources I think we're going to
have to define this aspect of the GPL a little better. If we don't, then I
don't see how we're going to convince authors to use it on their software.

-Mark


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